The Microsoft Word word processor was first introduced for MS-DOS in 1983. Its design made use of a mouse and WYSIWYG graphics. Its crude WYSIWYG/mouse support was a direct response to the Apple Lisa/Mac, and VisiCorp Visi On. Initially it competed against many popular word processors such as WordStar, Multimate, and WordPerfect. Word for DOS was never really successful.

Microsoft Multiplan was an early 8-bit spreadsheet application for CP/M and MS-DOS with ports to numerous other platforms in the early 80s. Initially it competed against VisiCalc and later Lotus 1-2-3. A companion product, Microsoft Chart, provided graphing support. Multiplan was never ported to Windows, where it was replaced with Microsoft Excel. Excel also replaced Multiplan on the Macintosh platform.

Netscape Navigator/Communicator was the first commercial web browser, displacing the free NCSA Mosaic. 1.0 was first released in December 1994, and initially offered advanced features such as progressively rendering pages as they loaded. It quickly gained many other features and capabilities and became the most popular web browser in the mid 1990s. One reason for its popularity, it was licensed freely for personal and non-profit use, although companies were expected to pay for a license. It later competed with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, and eventually was open sourced in to the Mozilla browser.

Norton Commander is a MS-DOS based file shell that was widely popular due to it's two column design. You could easily copy and move files between one folder or another, execute DOS commands and more. It competed against many other file managers including Gazelle Q-DOS and Xtree

Tools for converting and running Windows applications in OS/2.

Aldus PageMaker, later Adobe PageMaker, is a desktop publishing program for Mac and Windows. First released in 1985, PageMaker was the first desktop publishing program for the Macintosh. It was followed over a year later with the release of 1.0 for the IBM PC. The PC version was a notable application as it was one of the few rare applications which would run under Windows 1.x. PC PageMaker 1.0 bundled a runtime version of Windows. This enabled MS-DOS users who had not decided to buy Windows to run PageMaker. Aldus skipped version 2.0 on the PC to bring version number in sync with the 3.0 Mac product.

A tool from PowerQuest, and later Symantec, that enables manipulation of partitions through its own bootable media. PartitionMagic can shrink, grow, or move partitions without the need to backup and restore files in that partition. It supported a variety of file systems, and the core DOS-based parition tool fit on a bootable 1.44mb floppy disk. It was extremely popular, and made installing or removing multiple OSes much easier.

These disks contain Hardware and Graphics tests from 1990 for Microsoft Windows 2, and OS/2 1.x Presentation Manager.

PC/DACS is a system utility that adds password protected access control to a computer. It support session timeout, usage time restrictions, boot protection, system drive encryption, and GUI tools for all administrative tasks.

Pmcomm is an easy to use personal telecommunications program for IBM OS/2. Supports powerful features such as scripting.

Borland Sidekick is a DOS based PIM (Personal Information Manager) and one of the first widely-used TSR (terminate and stay resident) programs. The key feature of Sidekick was that one could use Sidekick's utilities while using most other MS-DOS applications. This was important because MS-DOS had no built-in multi-tasking or task switching capabilities.

Simply Accounting is a complete general accounting package targeted as small businesses. Includes General Ledger, Purchases and Payments, Sales and Receipts, Payroll, Inventory Control, and Project Costing functionality.

Stacker, from Stack Electronics, was a hard drive compression tool. It was wildly popular until Microsoft virtually eliminated the third party market for this by including their own drive compression tool with MS-DOS 6. and Expandz! Plus.

Object Desktop is a set of utilities for OS/2 power users. It provides a number of visual enhancements, define hotkeys, an improved editor, desktop configuration backup, archive management, system help advisors, and system backup.

StarOffice, initially from Star Division GmbH is an office suite containing a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, and graphing program. It was later owned by Sun Microsystems and then Oracle, and spawned the open source OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Also see the earlier StarWriter

StarWriter is a powerful word processor for OS/2 and Windows. It was one of the applications that eventually merged in to StarOffice. It was released by the German company StarDivision.

SY-TOS is a powerful backup program for DOS, and other operating systems. It was commonly customized for and bundled with OEM backup hardware. SY-TOS Plus was the first retail standalone version.

Virtual PC started off originally as an x86 emulator for PowerPC Macintosh to run MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. Connectix, the company that made it, was purchased by Microsoft. Virtual PC was then retooled into a virtualization tool for x86 systems. Microsoft discontinued Virtual PC in favor of a server-oriented virtualization product called Hyper-V.

First released in 1989, Wingz was a highly promoted cross platform spreadsheet available for Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, NeXTSTEP, and Unix. At the time, it had a number of advantages over Microsoft Excel and others. It featured spreadsheets up to 32768 cells in both directions, in-cell editing, a powerful graphing system, and a macro-programming language called HyperScript. important features. Although the 1.1 updated corrected much of this, it hurt the products sales and acceptance.

During the late 1980's, WordPerfect was THE standard word processor for DOS based PCs in big business. Under DOS, it competed mostly against Wordstar. WordPerfect for Windows enjoyed some success in the early Windows environments, but was quickly displaced by Microsoft Word for Windows. Later Windows versions were part of Borland Office/Novell PerfectOffice/Corel Office/Corel WordPerfect Office.